Media Highlights

“There’s always the impulse to punish speech we don’t like,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But the First Amendment protects all speech. Once you open this door, it could set a very dangerous precedent. What about teachers who criticize Donald Trump?”

“Judges are free to use their opinions to comment on the law and larger issues, as long as the focus of the opinion is right,” said Fogel, who now directs the Berkeley Judicial Institute at UC Berkeley Law. “Legal opinions are not usually that exciting. He was trying to say, this is really important.”

“I’m tremendously worried,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. “Using the military for domestic law enforcement is something that’s characteristic of authoritarian regimes.”

For Jeremy Fogel, a former federal trial judge in California and executive director, Berkeley Judicial Institute, increasing the focus on judicial well-being is a project decades in the making.

“If there is a path toward authoritarianism for the United States, this is it,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinksy.

Former acting Labor Secretary Julie Su will be a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she will focus her work at the university’s Center for Law and Work.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.

Dean Erwin Chemerinsky joins Legal Face Off to discuss the latest on Gavin Newsom’s ban on ICE agents wearing face masks in California.

Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at CLEE joins Forum to discuss California’s climate goals.

Mike Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the need is about to explode with the advent of artificial Intelligence. “The data centers that we see now will just multiply,” he said. “And their need to cool their servers will multiply along with them.”

“It’s unnecessary to do what the administration is doing now, unless one is operating like a mob boss,” said UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy, Catherine E. Lahmon.

Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law, said requiring data on water use is a good first step, but local officials may not know what to do with that number alone.

“Change in the Supreme Court is always difficult,” writes Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “But in recent years, the justices have altered how they conduct oral arguments, and they now have audio broadcasts of arguments. It is time for them to go much further in providing transparency and openness.”

“This ruling in researchers’ favor is very consequential in this moment when the Trump Administration is applying maximum political pressure to UCLA,” said Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley and an attorney for the plaintiffs. “The effect of reinstating all unlawfully suspended NIH grants to UCLA would be to give campus and the regents the leverage they need to resist and to uphold the rule of law.”

UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said, “It’s an astounding position that the government is taking, that people’s constitutional rights can be violated.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, said Carr’s actions were part of a broad assault on free speech by the administration, which “is showing a stunning ignorance and disregard of the 1st amendment.”

“I believe courts could conclude that there is no reasonable need for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to be wearing masks other than in the exceptions provided in the bill,” Chemerinsky said. And although the legal challenges to SB627 will pose some “unprecedented” legal questions, he said, courts have allowed states to enforce their laws against federal officers despite challenges by the federal government.

“It’s understandable that those in power want to silence the speech that they don’t like, but the whole point of the 1st Amendment is to protect speech we don’t like,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “We don’t need the 1st Amendment to protect the speech we like.”

“This is wonderful news for UC researchers and should be tremendously consequential in ongoing UC negotiations with the Trump administration,” said Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor who is part of the legal team behind the suit. 

“It’s important that the state take a stand,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “It’s obviously not a slam dunk because there are arguments on both sides, but that’s often the case with the law.”

To Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of U.C. Berkeley School of Law, lines were clearly crossed. “The government, including the FCC, never can impose sanctions for the views expressed,” he says. “But that is exactly what Carr threatened and ABC capitulated.”

“You can’t advertise something if you know — or should know — that what you are saying isn’t true,” said Ted Mermin. executive director, Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice. “You do not need a law that’s called ‘the tequila purity law.'”

Catherine Crump, a clinical professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, said messaging and social media platforms have a virtual “ironclad immunity” from the content made by its users under Sec. 230. She noted that the law has long been viewed as out of date — artificial intelligence and algorithms to monitor speech or content, she noted, did not exist when it was passed — but the platforms are protected from their own content until an act of Congress makes changes.

Professor Christopher Kutz joins KQED’s Political Breakdown to discuss how the Trump administration is proposing to remake the UC System.

Judge Jeremy Fogel, executive director, Berkeley Judicial Institute weighs in on attacks on the judiciary.

“I think he [Trump] is chilling dissent,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California, Berkeley and a specialist in US constitutional law. “That’s where the analogy of the McCarthy era comes in.”

Trump is “very much wanting to use the tools of the government to try to silence the speech that he doesn’t like,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and a leading First Amendment scholar. “It’s not a new playbook for people to use power in that way, but we’ve never seen a president do anything like this before.”

“No democracy lasts forever,” said Dean Chemerinsky. “We all know countries in the world that were democracies and are no longer. And I believe that in this moment OUR democracy is in a more serious threat than it has ever faced in all of American history.”

Comparing the month before the inauguration to the month of July, arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions across the country have gone up about ten times, said David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law and the director of the project, a repository of ICE data collected largely via FOIA request. 

“When you collect this data, it’s really hard to control,” said Catherine Crump, director of UC Berkeley’s Technology & Public Policy Clinic. “It’s no different from once you share your data with Meta or Google, they’re going to repackage your data and sell it to advertisers and you don’t have any idea which of the advertising companies have your data.”

Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative for the CLEE at UC Berkeley Law School and former California insurance commissioner discusses the impacts of climate change on insurance.

“What we see now is an Office for Civil Rights that is not neutral,” says UC Berkeley Law’s Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law & Democracy and former OCR head, Catherine E. Lahmon, “that is not there for every student, and that is picking and choosing both which laws that it’s interested in and which students’ rights it’s interested to protect.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said he believes Donald Trump’s second presidency is fueling much of the recent spike in law school applicants. “I’m hearing much more from people who want to  protect the environment. They want to protect civil liberties. They want to protect immigrants’ rights,” he said. “Students who want to fight back are saying, ‘Law school is the way to do it.’”

Assistant Professor Elena Chachko weights in on the recent UC Court of Appeal ruling on Trump’s tariffs.

Alex Cheng and Emily Miles, 2Ls at Berkeley Law, founded the Berkeley NIL Initiative, or BNILI, which will be supervised by executive director of the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology Wayne Stacy.

“Every state, with varying degrees of severity, is facing increased frequency and severity of climate-driven, weather-related catastrophes. And so insurance companies throughout the U.S. are raising rates and declining to renew and write insurance. That’s landing with different levels of acuity in different parts of the country based on the severity and frequency of the climate-driven events, but there’s no get-out-of-climate-change free card in the U.S. This problem is landing everywhere.” – Dave Jones, director of Climate Risk Initiative, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, UC Berkeley Law